While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." ...
Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program ...
But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. ...
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and
states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what
happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But
your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern
for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. ...
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. ...
You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent
direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension
that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to
confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it
can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of
the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension."
I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of
constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind
so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half
truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective
appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the
kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths
of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and
brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to
create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the
door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call
for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a
tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was
"well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the
disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It
rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait"
has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our
distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. ...
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait."
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at
will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen
hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and
sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro
brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an
affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and
your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old
daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just
been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when
she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous
clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and
see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an
unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do
white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross
county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the
uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept
you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading
"white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your
middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name
becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected
title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the
fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never
quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and
outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
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